Shatter
by I Took the One Less Travelled
Summary: Even when it hurts, the Doctor remembers them all. Gen, Eleven-centric angst.


**Pairings: Mostly Gen, but hints of Doctor/Rose, Martha/Mickey, Donna/Shaun, Amy/Rory, Doctor/River.**

**Spoiler Warnings: The Angels Take Manhattan, Journey's End, Doomsday, The End of Time Part II, The Silence in the Library**

Rose Tyler's childhood is riddled with the out-of-order ramblings of a man with no name. She knows him before she ever knows him, and every park bench, every street corner that she passes, every Christmas and Easter and walk in the street features a man that only ever watches with an unbearably sad look in his eyes. He knows that he cannot do this forever, that Rose Tyler has limited life for him to replay like a recording, but he cannot help himself.

Martha Jones wakes up screaming from memories that Time said could never have happened. She sweats and swears and calls for the Doctor, and for Jack, and she calls her family's names—her mother and father and Tish, poor, innocent Tish, who had never done anything to deserve what Martha brought upon her by choosing to travel the stars with a man who turns everything that he touches to dust, eventually.

Donna Noble will never, ever know why she always feels broken, twisted, like she's missing more pieces than she could ever understand. She just knows that it feels like a leg, or an arm or a head is just _gone_, and somehow she is just now noticing. Remembering makes her think of gold light, a music, and makes her head hurt, so she always forgets again. She has everything that she had ever thought that she wanted in life, but somehow, even with Shaun— Shaun, the man that was everything that she would have asked for, if she had known herself well enough to know what to ask for—she just feels empty, broken, and unbearably alone.

Amy Pond will always wonder when waiting turned into life; all she ever did was wait for him, and now she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is never coming for her again. He has been everything in her life since she was seven, shaped her choices and her childhood games. He followed her into adulthood, he made her wedding happen, he lost her daughter, but somehow gave her back in the same breath, and now he is gone forever.

Jack Harkness will never, ever die, no matter how much he might want to sometimes. He doesn't need to find the ways that he's broken, because he's _wrong_, and he knows it. He is an impossible, _wrong _abomination, and he was never, ever meant to exist.

Mickey Smith holds his wife when she screams from the memories, and he despises the Doctor with more venom than he ever thought possible to direct at a single person, even as he acknowledges that without the Doctor's influence, he wouldn't be even half the man that he is today.

Rory Williams pretends not to know, not to understand what his wife gave up to be with him, and he wishes that the facade were enough. But when she cannot see it, he allows himself to grieve—because the Doctor was _his_, too. Maybe not his Raggedy Man, but the Doctor was the beginning, middle and end for him, too, because he's Amy's beginning, middle and end, and there is nothing that Rory will not share with her.

River Song knows that one day, she will look upon the man that she loves and he will not know her, and she envies Rose Tyler more than she could ever say, not for being with her man—because the Doctor is too big, too old, too encompassing to ever only belong to one person—but for having a story with him in the right order. For having a relationship with the most remarkable man that she has ever known without it being a moving tragedy. She is not stupid—she knows how this ends. On the day that she looks into his eyes and he does not know her, she knows that she will die. What other reason would there be for her not to continue to follow his timeline into his past?

The Doctor knows them all—remembers them all, and loves them all, in his own way. Rose—well, he's never had much willpower where Rose is concerned, and there is the unhealthy obsession with her childhood, because that is all of her that he has left. For Martha and Mickey, he stays away. He has ruined their lives enough. He can never, ever see recognition in Donna Noble's eyes again. He doesn't stalk her timeline like he does Rose's—it is too dangerous to go near her at all. He can never see Amy and Rory again. And River—every second that she moves away from him, she gets closer to her death, and he doesn't know what to do.

Except what he does best—move on without showing any damage, hiding the cracks, and find a pretty girl named Clara to show the universe to. Even knowing that it will one day end the same way for her.

**Sooo. This was supposed to be a drabble. It started out as a 250 word idea, and it sort of exploded. But think of it like an oversized drabble, because that is the style that it is written in. **


End file.
